YPSILANTI, Michigan. It’s 11 a.m. on a Monday morning, which means that the language skills of knowledge workers such as Mike Rehnstein haven’t reached the pre-weekend peak he scaled last Thursday, when he composed a lengthy email to his regional manager at LogikTek, a company that writes on-line manuals for computer software. “That was a beaut,” he says as he leans back in his ergonomically-designed office chair. “If I don’t get a 2% raise in December, there is no justice in the world.”
24-beer “suitcase” pack: suitable for traveling.
But the quality of the work Rehnstein’s cranking out today reflects the effects of the 24-beer “suitcase” pack of Bud Light beer he consumed over the weekend, in addition to several gin and tonics and half a jug of Gallo Chablis. “Nobody really gets serious around here until Monday afternoon,” he says with a breezy air as he hits the “send” button on his computer, adding a “post” to his blog “Mike’s Twisted Mind” that contains a misuse of “there” for “they’re,” a misspelling of “mischievous,” and a failure to use the subjunctive mood for a verb in a contingent phrase.
“Fool! You should have said ‘If I were,’ not ‘If I was.’”
Half a world away Tokugawa Ieyasu, a so-called “grammar samurai,” pounces, shredding Rehnstein’s work like a Kitchen Magician cutting through a head of cabbage to make cole slaw. “What kind of drugs you on, man,” Ieyasu writes, setting off a “grammar war” in the white comment boxes that follow the post. Soon, “eyeballs” attracted to the language brawl are clicking on links for Japanese consumer products, such as a combination digital camera/donut maker and a rice steamer that tells housewives when their husbands will be home from after-work karaoke sessions under current traffic conditions.
“‘I’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ or when sounded as ‘a’ in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh.’”
Ieyasu would normally be in line for a daily volume bonus and possibly a promotion to a managerial spot, but he makes a fatal error; he lets a subject-verb disagreement creep into a reply when he changes the personal pronoun “I” to the plural “we” in order to avoid the charge that he is egotistical, but then forgets to change the verb to a plural form. “We have made great progress but am not satisfied,” he writes, and the obloquy of a thousand internet grammarians rains down upon him.
“Tokugawa,” his daimyo Kosaka Danjo Masanobu writes somberly after seeing the comment thread, “you have brought shame upon our usage, grammar and orthography dojo. For this you must die.”
“Dear Diary–Today I killed myself. Probably won’t be writing you tomorrow.”
And so the younger man begins to prepare himself for seppuku, the ritual disembowelment that a samurai traditionally performs on himself after failure, commission of a serious offense or conduct that brings shame on his master.
“Search engine optimization is a very serious matter,” says Colin Peterson, a scholar who specializes in social media and the code of the samurai. “Tokugawa–or is Ieyasu the first name?–really had no choice after giving the enemy such powerful ammo in an on-line grammar battle.”
Yum!
Masanobu tries to ease the sting of the ritual suicide for his remaining employees with an after-work get-together that features sushi and a coconut-frosted bunny cake, but an undercurrent of fear pervades the gathering despite festive crepe-paper decorations in the normally drab employee lounge. “I know it is tradition, but still it is harsh,” says Hatori Hanzo, a wandering ronin–or samurai without a daimyo–who was hired a year ago and has progressed up the corporate ladder to hold the title of Assistant Vice President-Terrorizing Peasants. “We lose a lot of good interns that way.”